When Oliver Sacks talks, I listen. When he writes, he takes subjects and follows them to the very nerve-endings and synapses of the brain itself. He never writes without including some aspect of his amazing and diverse life, such as when he introduced the Island of the Colorblind by talking about his love for the cycads which were growing in the London Botanical Gardens. The island whose population were color blind also had these primitive cycad trees, whose existence dates back to Paleozoic times. I was amazed to discover that the subtropical sago palm which grows everywhere around New Orleans was not a true palm, but one of these ancient dinosaur age plants. When I read his books, my life changes — I can never look at a sago plant without admiration since that book. Nor can I think of cold and hot lights (fluorescence and tungsten bulbs) without thinking of his two uncles, one who pioneered in cold light, and the other a pioneer in hot lights, namely, his Uncle Tungsten of the eponymous book.
With this book, he has attacked music in the same way, delving deeply into his own experiences with music and deeply into what happens inside the minds and brains of many patients with various brain and nervous system anomalies which shed light on how our human body works vis-à-vis music. If you thought you understood music because you are a music lover, Sacks will open his bag of tricks and surprise and delight with novel aspects of music which few have heard of or discovered in their own lives, up until now. And once more he has changed my own life. This time, not in a pleasant way.
Did you ever notice a clock ticking in the room you were in? And once you've noticed the darn thing ticking how hard it is to get rid of the ticking? You cannot get it to stop ticking by conscious effort(1); the harder you try the more aware you become of its incessant tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock . . . Well, during his discussion of tinnitis(2) he describes various kinds of tinnitis, one of which matched a low level of tinnitis in my own ears, one of which I was hardly conscious of, until he mentioned it, I was plagued by my consciousness of it for several days, before I lapsed once more into blissful unawareness of it, but never again into blissful ignorance of it. Like Adam seduced by the apple that Eve-like Oliver offered, I have gotten knowledge of my tinnitis, and it become present whenever I think of or write about it. Let this be your warning, if you suspect you have low-level tinnitis, it may arise into consciousness while this review or the book, but rest assured, it will lapse once more into normal background noise in a short time.
I recall Betty Rankin, aka Big Mama of WWOZ.org fame, once saying over the radio, that she listened to WWOZ radio all night to help her sleep, and now I understand that she likely had enough tinnitis to otherwise keep her awake. My tinnitis is more like light hissing of a steam radiator, very constant and low volume, more like the white noise that some people buy and electronic generator for in order to help them sleep. Me, I have a white noise generator built-in.
In his Preface Sacks writes about music and quotes Schopenhauer, "The inexpressible depth of music — so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain . . . Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves." On this point, I would respectfully disagree esteemed philosopher. Once when the French Academy was debating whether a bear could dance, a man by the window looked out and saw a dancing bear in the street. In the face of contradictory evidence, a philosophical argument cannot stand. To those alive today who agree with Schopenhauer's last statement above, I would merely ask them to visit New Orleans and observe and participate in how music is integrated into life and all of its events.
We use the expression a bolt from the blue to refer to ideas which come to us in a flash, but Sacks begins his book with a story of a man, a doctor, who was talking on a pay phone outdoors when he was hit by a lightning flash which laid him out on the ground, dead, for all practical purposes. He reports floating above the scene, watching a woman giving him CPR.
[page 4] Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light . . . an enormous feeling of well-being and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. No emotion associated with these . . . pure thought, pure ecstasy. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up . . . there was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, 'This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had' — SLAM! I was back."
Dr. Cicoria knew he was back in his own body because he had pain — pain from the burns on his face and his left foot, where the electrical charge had entered and exited his body — and, he realized, "only bodies have pain." He wanted to go back, he wanted to tell the woman to stop giving him CPR, to let him go; but it was too late — he was firmly back among the living. After a minute or two, when he could speak, he said, "It's okay — I'm a doctor!" The woman (she turned out to be an intensive-care-unit nurse) replied, "A few minutes ago, you weren't."
The police finally took the doctor home instead of the hospital and later tests by cardiologist showed no problems. Just when his life seemed to have returned to normal several weeks later, he developed an intense desire to listen to piano music. He didn't own a piano, so he got recordings to satisfy his craze.
[page 5] This was completely out of keeping with anything in his past. He did not have a piano in his house. What music he did listen to tended to be rock music.
With this sudden onset of craving for piano music, he began to buy recordings and became especially enamored of a Vladimir Ashkenazy recording of Chopin favorites — the Military Polonaise, the Winter Wind Etude; the Black Key Étude, the A-flat Polonaise, the B-flat Minor Scherzo. "I loved them all," Cicoria said. "I had the desire to play them. I ordered all the sheet music. At this point, one of our babysitters asked if she could store her piano in our house-so now, just when I craved one, a piano arrived, a nice little upright. It suited me fine. I could hardly read the music, could barely play, but I started to teach myself." It had been more than thirty years since the few piano lessons of his boyhood, and his fingers seemed stiff and awkward.
This was only an appetizer for what was to come. Soon he heard music in his head.
[page 5, 6] "The first time," he said, "it was in a dream. I was in a tux, onstage; I was playing something I had written. I woke up, startled, and the music was still in my head. I jumped out of bed, started trying to write down as much of it as I could remember. But I hardly knew how to notate what I heard." This was not too successful — he had never tried to write or notate music before. But whenever he sat down at the piano to work on the Chopin, his own music "would come and take me over. It had a very powerful presence."
The music in his head seemed to "come from Heaven" as Mozart said about his music. Soon a music teacher came to help write down his music. Other than that, this was "a solitary pursuit, between himself and his muse." (Page 7)
Suddenly out of nowhere, like a grace note in music which doesn't appear in the written score, Cicoria's love of music appears in his life and his life is enhanced by it. Dr. Cicoria's story inspired me to write this poem (Copyright 2010 by Bobby Matherne).
A grace note
not to be questioned
Whether it be
flat or sharp —
A grace note
a lucky strike
A lightning strike
not to be questioned
But to be enjoyed.
A grace note,
A fillup
A flare
A soupçon
of music.
In his Preface, Sacks writes about the "extraordinary tenacity of musical memory" saying that "so much of what is heard during one's early years may be 'engraved' on the brain for the rest of one's life." Clearly he is correct about this, but he does not go far enough, lacking the insights of the science of doyletics which postulates that every event in one's life is "engraved" on the brain indefinitely. Not for the rest of ones life, however, because it is easy using the speed trace memory technique to remove events which would otherwise remain engraved for the rest of one's life. As one begins to understand how one removes consciously these engraved events from one's early life, one can see that many of events are removed unconsciously as one matures(4). These "engraved events" are called doylic events or simply doyles and for simplicity they are assumed be stored in doylic memory, which name is necessary to distinguish it from just plain memory (or cognitive memory). Doylic memory hold physical body states which includes a vast array of events in the body of the pre-five-year-old child: hearing, speaking, walking, handling objects, recognizing objects through their orientation, and various internal states we label generically as sadness, fear, anger, anxiety, joy, happiness, gladness, among many other states.
When I read the case history of Mrs. N. I wondered if a simple speed trace might have kept her from needing a partial temporal lobectomy.
[page 28] She had loved the Neapolitan songs, which reminded her of her childhood. ("The old songs," she said, "they were always in the family; they always put them on.") She found them "very romantic, emotional. . . they had a meaning." But now that they triggered her seizures, she began to dread them. She became particularly apprehensive about weddings, coming as she did from a large Sicilian family, because such songs were always played at celebrations and family gatherings. "If the band started playing," Mrs. N. said, "I would run out. . . . I had half a minute or less to get away."
Since our research into doyletics has found that doylic memories which trigger migraine, asthma, allergies, rashes, and various kinds of automatic responses, it seems possible that a simple minute or two speed trace could remove the very trigger which caused her grand mal seizures. I leave this as an open question, but one could promise relief without surgery for many people who suffer various kinds of seizures. The trace procedure is very fast and after short training(5), it can be used by the patient on themselves upon the slightest symptom of the seizure coming on.
One of the keys to a general acceptance of the science of doyletics would be a physiological confirmation of the Memory Transition Age of five years old. Extensive traces going back 35 years have shown that if a doyle is traced back before the age of 5, it will not return while traces only going to ages 6 or older will allow the doyle to return at some future time. From the description of how the functional MRI scans were able to notice the filling of musical gaps, it seems clear that a functional MRI could provide physiological confirmation of the Memory Transition Age.
[page 33] Physiological confirmation of such "filling in" by involuntary musical imagery has recently been obtained by William Kelley and his colleagues at Dartmouth, who used functional MRI to scan the auditory cortex while their subjects listened to familiar and unfamiliar songs in which short segments had been replaced by gaps of silence. The silent gaps embedded in familiar songs were not noticed consciously by their subjects, but the researchers observed that these gasp "induced greater activation in the auditory association areas than did silent gaps embedded in unknown songs; this was true for gaps in songs with lyrics and without lyrics."
A speed trace converts a doylic memory into a cognitive memory. The same stimulus which triggered the doylic memory before trigger thereafter only a cognitive memory. Thus the region where the doylic memory had been stored since before five (engraved in the brain) will be bypassed after a speed trace, and instead a section of the cortex will be activated. A functional MRI before a speed trace should show activity in the limbic region's amygdaline structures and none in the cortex, and after the trace, there should be no activity in the same limbic region, but activity showing up in the cortex itself. This research work will be an enormous boon to humankind. It will be done sometime, but why not now? The equipment and the hypotheses are ready for testing and confirmation.
Sacks described several instances of hallucinatory music playing in his head. Here is one of them.
[page 280] I had another musical dream, and this too continued into the waking state. Here, in contrast to the Mozart, I found something deeply disturbing and unpleasant about the music, and longed for it to stop. I had a shower, a cup of coffee, went for a walk, shook my head, played a mazurka on the piano — to no avail. The hateful hallucinatory music' continued unabated. Finally I phoned a friend, Orlan Fox, and said that I was hearing songs that I could not stop, songs that seemed to me full of melancholy and a sort of horror. The worst thing, I added, was that the songs were in German, a language I did not know. Orlan asked me to sing or hum some of the songs. I did so, and there was a long pause.
"Have you abandoned some of your young patients?" he asked. "Or destroyed some of your literary children?"
"Both," I answered. "Yesterday. I resigned from the children's unit at the hospital where I have been working, and I burned a book of essays I had just written. . . . How did you guess?"
"Your mind is playing Mahler's Kindertotenlieder," he said, "his songs of mourning for the death of children." I was amazed by this, for I rather dislike Mahler's music and would normally find it quite difficult to remember in detail, let alone sing, any of his Kindertotenlieder. But here my dreaming mind, with infallible precision, had come up with an appropriate symbol of the previous day's events. And in the moment that Orlan interpreted the dream, the music disappeared; it has never recurred in the thirty years since.
Once more Oliver Sacks has set a table before me with a feast of incredible stories and amazing insights. His willingness to share his own stories make all of his stories more believable. One can read two dozen books about how the human brain processes music or simply read this one. Sacks has done the homework for us, provided a crib sheet for us, and understanding the human brain just a little simpler for the non-neuroscientist reader. Something you can find out more about in Bobby Matherne's DIGESTWORLD Issue#105.
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